Transform your book into a podcast

Turn Best Selling Author into Top Ranked Influencer by converting your book into the content design for a podcast on your topic.

Did you write a book or just create the scripts to 52 episodes of a weekly podcast?

Hopefully, that got the attention of my author friends out there! I know that writing a book is hard. I’ve written a few books that have never seen the light of day. I also know that selling a book is even harder. Several of my friends that have finished their books find selling it even harder than writing it. That goes to show why they don’t call it Best Writing Author and why they call it Best Selling Author!

Ouch, right?

Now, you sit on the long tail of Amazon’s platform waiting for a nibble or two. All that work you put into writing a book only to have sales flatline.

It’s time to give that book a second life!

How do you give it a second life?

What if you could tell your story and sell your book at the same time? What if you could use all the content in your book to help drive sales to your book? You can by turning your book into a podcast — a podcast based on your book!

The strategy is simple to understand, but difficult to execute. Here’s a quick breakdown:

#1 — Podcast Design: First, you will need to design a podcast based on your book’s main premise.

#2 — Podcast Schedule: Next, you’ll need to break your book up into 52 logical mini-topics, or topics that can be self-contained within a 20-60 minute audio episode. This can be segmented with your first episode that introduces your podcast, special episodes, and even interviews based on relevance to your topic. All in all, you really only need to come up with 40+ episodes actually based on your book’s content. That should not be too difficult if you think about how your book is already organized.

There’s no need to recreate the wheel. Just follow your book’s natural progression from episode to episode. Tell your story in spoken word audio the same way a reader would experience it themselves. If you think about your podcast as a reader would your book, 40+ episodes are really the 10-12 chapters of your book broken down into stand-alone themes.

Then, within each of those chapter themes, find three (3) or more sub-themes. This should be enough content for at least one year’s worth of weekly podcasting (or more).

#3 — Podcast Book Promotion: Finally, turn your stagnant book sales into a 52 episode audio series where each episode features your book as the content and the sponsor. The ads become your ads, and the deals and sales become your deals and sales. When you control the content and the ads, everything comes to you. Not only can you expose listeners to each of your books main points, but you can engage with them, hear from them, and find out what they think of you and your concepts.

This gives you tremendous leverage over other books on your topic. Other peoples books are just books, but your podcast on your book is audio content, author’s perspectives, behind-the-scene extras, and even BONUS content that includes amplifying thoughts, additional viewpoints, new information, and even parts you left out of the book due to time or context.

Think of it as your book’s Director’s Cut, only given out in 52 bite-sized chunks.

#4 — Podcast Book Research: This strategy has a huge side benefit too. It helps you flesh out ideas for Book Number Two while you engage with real fans using content from Book Number One. This is A/B testing of a book you haven’t even written yet.

Furthermore, it can lead you to entirely different directions with content already tested to be what your audience wants. When you know what your audience wants, you can turn Best Selling Author into Top Ranked Influencer on your topic.

#5 — Podcast Book Commitment: You don’t get ANY of these advantages if you never take the time to convert your book into a podcast. Sure, podcasting your latest book may not be for those who only want to try it out. Mainly because this is a strategy requires you to become dedicated to building your podcast for at least 1- to 3-years. In other words, you have to commit if this strategy if you want it to have any chance of working.

Go Beyond Your Book

Are YOU are ready to do the work that will save your book sales? If so, you have a huge advantage over most new podcasters. You not only have a year’s worth of content (at least) to work with upfront, but you also have a book to sell with your podcast.

Use your book to give yourself something most podcasters only wish they had: a head start on content development!

My Sites

About Me

Kyle Bondo is a thinker, podcaster, author, and creative strategy dragon seeking to make a small dent in the universe. With over 20-years of experience in finding creative ways to solve business and technology challenges, Kyle is the missing link between your ponytails and propeller heads. More a sure-footed mountain goat then unicorn, Kyle is right kind of weird for those teams that need a creative perspective on wicked problems.